


The Walls Have Ears, You Know

by Dragonwithatale



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Eldritch Bunker - Freeform, Eldritch Creature Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Gen, Post 14x15, blatent misuse of the Arabian Nights, look what you did you took a perfectly good cosmic entity and you gave it anxiety, though honestly I have no solid idea of where
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 09:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18407426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonwithatale/pseuds/Dragonwithatale
Summary: Castiel reads the Bunker a story





	The Walls Have Ears, You Know

**Author's Note:**

> My usual love and gratitude to the MM squad for feeding my Bunker habit, and very specifically to [Thayer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThayerKerbasy/pseuds/ThayerKerbasy) and [Foop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FormidablePassion/pseuds/FormidablePassion) for cheerfully making the jump from the Bunker dyeing everyone's laundry pink to Cas reading stories to it.

The Bunker ticks softly, the heat of summer slowly cooling from its concrete walls and bones as evening turns from dusk to night.  It settles in to wait, shuffling empty rooms and basement hallways while the Winchesters drift slowly towards bed, their thoughts and voices a pleasant buzz that soften to warm whispers of dream and nightmare.    
  
Nightmares are an inevitable feature for its residents, which it still finds peculiar, as if humanity had tried to compensate for being stuck in linear time by reliving the worst of their lives over and over again.  The Bunker is very careful not to visit those points of its own existence again, personally.  It likes having people, it likes them making noise and being warm and spilling over with emotion and curiosity and affection and friendship.  It’s glad for the noise and the company.  The Bunker does not like the quiet anymore.  Or the cold empty dark.  
  
A warm hand on the front door brings the Bunker’s attention back to the present.  Castiel checks the locks every night, making a quiet round of the living spaces; tonight, the Bunker watches closely as fingers brush over wards one after another until finally the angel comes to light in the library.  
  
Castiel has been slowly reading through the Bunker’s collection.  The past several nights have involved silently reading through a treatise on monster morphology and environmental adaptation, which the Bunker may have… twisted reality a bit to move elsewhere.  Castiel frowns at the blue cloth cover he finds in its place, tracing over the gilt letters.  
  
“That is not where this goes Dean,” he mutters.  Castiel puts the book back in its proper place, on the other side of the room, which the Bunker does not want.  It moves the book back.  The angel glares at the book, and then at the ceiling, before huffing.  “I thought you liked the Men of Letters filing system.”  
  
The Bunker does like the filing system.  It’s efficient and useful.  But the past few weeks… the hallways are quiet and empty and the floor still tastes of cleaning fluid where the blood was, and the humans are sleeping, and Castiel’s voice is soothing.  It didn’t know it wanted soothing and it doesn’t know how else to ask.  It nudges reality a hair, inching the book out just a bit.  
  
“You want me to read this?”  
  
Yes.  Yes that’s exactly what it wants.  It waits excitedly as the angel takes the book to his chair, opens it, and begins reading.  Silently.  That is _not_ what it wants.  
  
The Bunker does something which it knows is very _very_ rude and it turns the lights out.  All of them.  It hears the annoyance in Castiel’s sigh but stubbornly keeps the angel in the dark.  
  
“Do you want me to read it or not?”  
  
Yes.  It flashes the lights in the war room on and then off.  
  
“I can’t actually see in this much darkness.”  Yes, this is why the lights are _off_.  “You want me to read it… out loud?”  
  
The lights come back on in the library.  The Bunker almost adds the lovely red lights but its inhabitants seem to find those slightly disturbing for some reason.  The angel opens the book again, paging past the introduction to where the story begins.  
  
“‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionating, the Compassionate! Praise be to Allah, the beneficent king, the creator of the universe, lord of the three worlds, who set up the firmament without pillars in its stead and who stretched out the earth even as a bed; and grace, and prayer-blessing be upon our lord Mohammed, lord of apostolic men and upon his family and companion train.  Prayer and blessings enduring and grace, which unto the day of doom shall remain, amen!  O thou of the three worlds sovereign!  Verily the words and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day…’”  
  
A world unfolds in the gravely tones of Castiel’s voice, one with palaces in a place called Samarkand in a time so very long ago.  Long before the Bunker learned to think, centuries before it was pulled into this space and became walls and doorways and the infinity between points, but not older than Castiel.  He may have seen this story being written down; maybe he knew the king whose wife betrayed him so cruelly and the horrible revenge he brought down on the entire kingdom.    
  
“‘Tell on,’ quoth the King, who chanced to be sleepless and restless and therefore was pleased with the prospect of hearing her story.  So Scheherazade rejoiced, and thus, on the first night of the Thousand Nights and a Night, she began her recitations.”  
  
Maybe he saw the clever woman herself, heard her tell the first story.  The Bunker wishes it could ask.  It wishes it could ask anything.  Talk to its inhabitants.  Or that they’d talk back and tell it what was happening.  If they’d actually talk to each other it would be a lot less confused about the past seven years of its existence.  
  
“It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that there was a fisherman well stricken in years who had a wife and three children, and withal was of poor condition.”  
  
The Bunker hummed to itself as the fisherman pulled the bottle from the ocean and freed the djinn contained within, swapping a few rooms on the second floor idly.  It had wanted to meet an Ifrit up until it heard this story the first time (brief flashes of memory: a young blond scholar who never learned not to read under his breath sitting in the archives, the kitchen, the library, dead on the floor from a spell gone wrong dead _dead gone silent_ — stop).  The scholarly texts the Men of Letters had pored over made them seem fascinating, but this one was definitely not friendly to humans.  
  
The Bunker wonders briefly if the djinn queen Castiel said he’d wed last year was as tall as the one in the story.  How would that even work?  The Ifrit is supposed to reach up to the clouds (which is a horrible metric for distance; even with the story being at the sea side and therefore definitely ‘sea level’, the Bunker had no idea if sea level was the same that long ago, and there is still a massive height difference between cloud types.  And that’s assuming the Ifrit actually reached the clouds and it wasn’t an illusion brought on by magic, terror, or starvation, or simply an exaggeration by the storyteller.  After all, he was a _fisherman_.  They’re required by natural law to make things bigger in stories.  A hundred feet would be more than enough to provoke that reaction.)  Castiel when in his own form, on the other wall, is larger than the Bunker can expand to.  Or he is as small and sometimes as fragile as a human.  Either way, someone would get stepped on and squashed quite thoroughly, which is not how marriages are supposed to work according to the Netflix oracle.  
  
“And what thing have I done to deserve death, I who freed thee from the jar, and saved thee from the depths of the sea, and brought thee up on the dry land?”  
  
They never seem to do anything to deserve it.  That the fisherman doesn’t understand any better than the Bunker doesn’t help.  
  
“How didst thou fit into this bottle which would not hold thy hand - no, nor even thy foot - and how came it to be large enough to contain the whole of thee?”  
  
Then again, the fisherman really wasn’t that bright.  Sure, trapping the djinn back in the bottle was _clever_ , but fitting a foot the size of a car (or bus) into a bottle isn’t hard at all.  All you do is bend space a little.  There’s a closet on the second floor that has a forest of old mops and brooms that goes on for miles in every direction, all inside of four square feet with a door that opens _in_.  That’s hard.  
  
The Bunker quiets itself, focusing on the story, on the voice, the words, the sandpaper slide of hands over paper.  Slowly, slowly, something inside of the Bunker uncoils, and it rattles a sigh through the vents.  Castiel taps his foot lightly on the floor and everything is fine.  The story continues; magical fish (the Bunker would like an aquarium… it may have built an atrium for Felix but it had dissolved it after the snake dissolved…), betrayal, love, and happy endings that come covered in blood.  Such human things.  Even ending: that too is human, but here and now at least the story continues.  One ending bleeds into another beginning, and nothing ends, not really.  
  
“‘And yet-’ hello Dean.”  The Bunker does not jump.  It can’t jump.  It is very firmly limited to its external dimensions.  It does accidentally swallow one of the guest rooms; it panics and immediately replaces it (though with far less dust than there was before.  And it’s not sure if the sheets are the right shade.  And maybe there had been papers in the desk oh dear…)  
  
“What are you doing?”  The hunter is standing in the back doorway, sleep rumpled in his robe, peering at the angel.  How had it not noticed the door being opened.  
  
“Reading.”  
  
“I could hear that,” Dean says, fighting a yawn.  “Why are you talking when you’re doing it?”  
  
The Bunker shivers, anxiously focusing on Castiel.  For some reason the hunters don’t seem to understand that the Bunker is what it is, no matter how lost they get they don’t say anything.  Rooms move wholesale and not a word, just a quick glance at the walls or the ceiling in confusion or anger.  The angel is the only one who even knows it is alive.  If Castiel tells them they might talk to the Bunker but maybe they’d leave and the lights would go out again…  
  
Cas closes the book partly, one finger marking the page, and shifts so that his foot slides soothingly across the floor.  “It was too quiet tonight.”  
  
Dean blinks owlishly.  “That’s what tv is for.  Or those podcast things Sam always has.”  
  
“Did I wake you up?”  Castiel is very polite and the Bunker feels guilty for not checking the acoustics before it asked him to begin reading.  It forgets to fix all of the physics sometimes.  
  
“Nah, couldn’t sleep.”  That is definitely not true, he was asleep earlier, and from the way the angel frowns he knows it too.  Dean shuffles a little, scratching at the back of his head.  “It’s fine, I should go back…”  
  
“You could stay.”  The two exchange a look that the Bunker doesn’t quite understand.  
  
“You gonna read me a bedtime story, Cas?”  There’s a note of teasing to it, but Castiel nods and gestures to the opposite chair.  
  
“Stay.”    
  
Dean settles into the chair, relaxing into a comfortable sprawl that provokes a fond grin from Castiel.  He opens the book again, clearing his throat and starting the next story.  
  
“Once upon a time there was a porter in Baghdad…”  
  
The Bunker ticks softly to itself, listening raptly.  It will remember this for a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> To my unending annoyance I couldn't find a full copy of the Arabian Nights online that I liked, so all excerpts are taken from the antique copy of Burton's translation I begged off of my sibling. It's old enough it felt like it might be in the MoL collection.


End file.
